The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Looking at Apple's rivals, each holds a combination of the tangible and the intangible that make them seem unassailable. For Amazon, it's the reality of investment in an endless array of e-commerce infrastructure and the perception that will someday make it wildly profitable. For Google, there is the incredible keyword advertising franchise powered by the world's leading search engine and a commitment to long-range ideas like self-driving cars that create a sense the company will be with us for generations. Samsung has world-beating market share in smartphones along with near perfect vertical integration in the components required to make them, giving it perpetual access to leading edge technology. In spite of all that, Apple has ridden its iPhone franchise to more profits than all of them. It's reward? The wealth of Midas -- and a belief it's doomed.

To clear up the confusion, I don't share that belief; it belongs to the investment community, which values the company that once invented the future as if it has none. After an extraordinary run that included the iPod, iPhone, Macbook Air and iPad, it's easy to become jaded and expect something magical quite frequently. And in fairness to critics, it's also easy to look at the life cycle of consumer-electronics products and assume that margins will fall, people will eventually replace them less frequently, and without a new blockbuster, Apple will become much less profitable. What the negative equation misses, however, is the profound opportunity the company has to turn some of the world's most loyal customers into an annuity business, a recurring revenue stream. Ultimately, the trillion-dollar question is whether Apple will get there before the opportunity disappears.

Down this road before

Last summer, as Apple flirted with a $700 billion market capitalization, the idea of reaching a trillion-dollar valuation didn't seem so far-fetched. Of course, the stock fell 40% from those highs and interest in the topic waned along with the share price. What's perhaps less apparent is that Microsoft's 1999 high point of $620 billion would be $846 billion in today's dollars. The company instead is worth just $264 billion. The tale of what went wrong is a cautionary one for Apple because Microsoft has tried to build new businesses, including: the Bing search engine (not so successful but a good counterweight to Google), Xbox (commercially successful, but with only limited profits) and Azure (it's cloud platform, which is now a billion-dollar business, not including another billion from cloud-based Office 365).

That said, as Apple looks forward, it has advantages Microsoft lacked. First, it doesn't actually sell its customers much, but has a great retail platform and online App Store to sell them more. Second, the tablet and smartphone markets are still young, and helping them mature presents opportunities to generate new revenues. Third, Apple's valuation is actually quite low versus where Microsoft's was back in 1999 and against the stock market broadly. Fourth, with more than $140 billion in cash and profits that are averaging $10 billion through the first three quarters of its current fiscal year, the company has the ability to comfortably put $200 billion to work over the next 5 years securing its future. It it got aggressive with debt or used stock in acquisitions, it could easily double that war chest. For perspective, that's enough money to buy Google, leaving aside the regulatory concerns and the fact that the founders would never agree to sell.

Spend it on what?

In the earlier segments of this series, I looked at why expanding the stock buyback is a bad idea. If you're still doubting that, learn more about Microsoft's lost decade of buybacks and flat share prices or look at Cisco, with $50 billion in cash, $80 billion in buybacks and a $140 billion market cap. If they had not repurchased a single share, could the stock possibly be trading for less than the $130 billion in cash they'd have? I also examined the rationale behind the lower-priced iPhone and the opportunity for Apple to significantly expand its retail footprint.

Breaking out the spending of the money will continue to take more space than a single post can reasonably cover, so several of these ideas will be revisited in the coming days and weeks (and reader thoughts that I don't list are welcome, so please share them). But broadly, Apple has opportunities to build recurring revenue streams or grow its business in many of the following:

Mobile advertising: Apple is launching iTunes radio in large part to better build out its advertising offering. A lot of apps are ad-supported, which makes developers reliant on them for income. But Apple's lone ad product, iAd, is an also ran. As I've discussed in examining Pandora before, ads atop music are low value so I'm skeptical this is going to be a huge win, even though Apple will likely do much better than Pandora in attracting higher-quality advertising. To make this work, Apple needs to buy, not build. The company has no real DNA here while the Millennial Media's of the world are cheap. In the meantime, Facebook is making a fortune selling ads promoting apps on Facebook; Apple is making zero selling ads promoting apps in... the App Store. Conservatively, there's a billion-dollar business.